Google´s market domination is staggering. Those guys attract far more search users and thus revenues than all its rivals (Yahoo!, MSN etc.) together.

Trends in search engine marketing tracked by the SEM report from eMarketer estimates that Google search accounts for as much as 75% in the US paid search advertising market in 2007. The Search Engine Marketing report tracks the trends that are driving the massive but still-growing search advertising market.

Second in the list is Yahoo!, accounting for a pathetic share of 9% share. Leaving behind others in the search engine market with a 16% maket share.
However, 16% is still big business. Assuming that as much as over $8.6 billion have been spent in search engine advertising in 2007, a 16% share accounts for almost $1.4 billion. According to predictions that search spending might doubble to $16.6 billion in 2011, even a small slice represents huge revenue.

Microsoft´s quick & dirty purchase offer towards Yahoo might indeed cause a kind of market consolidation in the search advertising market in the mid term.

Due to worries about Google´s market domination many in the online advertising business would favour a market consolidation. Hence it would be a smart move strenghtening its rivals and thus creating viable alternaties.

Amongst the top three market player in the US market, Google is outperforming Yahoo and MSN by far in terms of search advertising spendings in 2006 and 2007.


The search advertising business is slow but still growing and an indeed attractive bussiness according to Efficient Frontier.

Every increase in market share counts and the competion is fierce.- and there is still room for profitability improvements in terms of ROI and click through rates. eMarketer´s projections predict that in the US search and ad spendings might slow down in the years to come but are to remain the largest portion of the US Internet ad spending market.

Although eMarketer projects that US search ad spending growth will cool off through 2012 compared with recent years, search will remain the largest portion of the US paid ad spending market accounting up to a 40% share which will more or lesss remain stable over the coming years.

Morgan Stanley offers a interesting slide (download here) sowhing the growth of web 2.0 sites. The slides are based on Alexa statistics. In favor of the right (green) sites, the left (red) sites dropped out of the TOP 10 list.

Social Networks and Social Media Services can now claim six of the top-10 slots.

According to Morgan Stanley, worldwide Internet usage has passed the 1 billion mark last year, and is estimated to hit more than 1.3 billion this year. The provided chart also shows the reach of Internet users by region.

During his speech at the Web 2.0 Summit, MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe and Rupert Murdoch (NewsCorp CEO) announced that MySpace will open up the platform for third-party applications. This strategic move will position MySpace to a direct head-to-head competition with number one rival Facebook and its successful F8 application platform.

According to DeWolfe, Myspace will be opened up within the next few months, and that MySpace will set up a sandbox on the site as a staging system for new applications. Also, within the next days, MySpace will come up with a catalog for all current widgets on MySpace, making it easier to find and install them.